A moving biblio-memoir that’s a gift to readers of all ages, especially those in midlife who want to stroll down the memory lane of their formative reading experiences ... The book’s engaging, breezy chapters explore each subject’s life and writings in chronological order ... Biggs serves up amuse-bouche anecdotes about each figure ... The resulting juxtapositions are often poignant, albeit with few surprises ... Biggs doesn’t approach these monumental writers as one’s professor would have. Instead, she writes about them as if reminiscing about late, lamented friends ... There’s precious little material considering authorship, marriage or divorce in context. History is glossed over. Class and economics come up only glancingly. Intersectional approaches aren’t the book’s strong suit ... About this lack, Biggs is again charmingly self-deprecating ... A Life of One’s Own has much to offer readers new to its subjects.
A Life of One’s Own is itself the writerly achievement she had hoped for, which means that the larger story of her absorbing, eccentric book is the story of how she came to write it ... Biggs is an attentive reader ... Biggs’s book is fuelled by faith in the transmission of feeling as knowledge ... Alongside Biggs’s search for a way to be a woman apart from being a wife is her search for a way to be a writer apart from being a critic. On the evidence of A Life of One’s Own, she has found it.
[An] unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography ... Biggs seems to take a more jaded view of marriage, hardly crediting that any woman might survive it with her independence and spirit intact ... Biggs has chosen women who put their own lives into their writing – as has she.
Full of strange and arresting images from the lives of talented oddballs ... Assembling vignettes of extremely famous writers...is easy, but tying them together is harder. The subtitle, Nine Women Writers Begin Again, suggests a thesis that never quite emulsifies ... Biggs could have chosen a different genre or written this one better.
This decision to stand herself alongside the greats is a bold one, teetering on the knife-edge between admirable ambition and self-aggrandisement ... Her search for connection results in some observations that may be significant to Biggs, but less so to the reader ... Biggs is more than capable of rigorous criticism, and the book includes close readings of several novels – but her decision to write in a different mode is deliberately provocative.
[A] finely tuned blend of memoir, literary criticism, and biography ... he sharp analysis and biographical sketches testify to how literature has long served as a site of reinvention for women ... Book lovers will swoon over this smart meditation on life and writing.
In this mixture of memoir and literary criticism, featuring moments in the lives of writers who thrived in moments of transition, the author begins with a series of rapid-fire questions, clearly seeking urgent answers ... An enlightening meditation on the intersections of art and freedom.
